Possible Antedating of "Scientology"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Apr 15 22:16:49 UTC 2007


"Logos," which also means simply "word." I would have taken "lgos" for
a simple typo, if not for all the question marks. Better safe than
sorry, I guess.

-Wilson

On 4/15/07, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Possible Antedating of "Scientology"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> OED has 1951 first use.  Wikipedia has the following:
>
> Although today associated almost exclusively with Hubbard's work, the word
> "Scientology" predates Hubbard's creation by several decades. Philologist Allen
> Upward used the word "scientology" in his 1901 book The New Word as a synonym
> for "pseudoscience",[42] and this is sometimes cited as the first coining of
> the word.[43] In 1934, the Argentine-German writer Anastasius Nordenholz
> published a book using the word positively: Scientologie, Wissenschaft von der
> Beschaffenheit und der Tauglichkeit des Wissens ("Scientology, Science of the
> Constitution and Usefulness of Knowledge").[44] Nordenholz's book is a study of
> consciousness, and its usage of the word is not greatly different from
> Hubbard's definition, "knowing how to know".[45] However, it is not clear to
> what extent Hubbard was aware of these earlier uses. The word itself is a
> pairing of the Latin word scientia ("knowledge", "skill"), which comes from the
> verb scire ("to know"), and the Greek ????? lgos ("reason" or "inward thought"
> or "logic" or "an account of").
>
> notes 42-45:
> # ^ Allen Upward: The New Word, pp 139, 149 & 156
> # ^ Atack, Jon (1990). A Piece of Blue Sky. New York, NY: Carol Publishing
> Group, 128. ISBN 0-8184-0499-X.
> # ^ http://www.scientologie.de/scientologie/index.htm
> # ^ Hubbard, L. Ron Scientology Fundamentals 1956 (website accessed 04/13/06)
>
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